Think about the longest road trip you’ve ever taken
Chances are, even if it was a long one, it was done in comfort.
Air conditioning in the car.
Plenty of coffee and drinks from stops along the way.
Maybe a detour or two to see the Wawa Goose, or Mac the Moose.
Traveling today, even air travel with all its annoyances, is fairly comfortable.
Did you ever have to walk through hundreds of kilometres in the rain, snow and heat, struggling to find food for your grumbling stomach?
Were you forced to take rickety rafts down raging waters where the threat of drowning was around every river bend?
Would you risk it all on the off chance you could maybe find a little gold in the end?
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today we are sick with fever… gold fever and today I’m sharing the story of dreamers who had it too.
These are… …The Overlanders!
Gold can make people do incredible things.
On the mere hope of finding some, humans will travel immense distances, through difficult terrain, with no guarantee of becoming rich.
In the 19th century, the lottery didn’t exist other than finding paydirt in a gold rush.
While the Klondike is the most famous one in Canada it was not the only one.
In 1856, gold was discovered along the Thompson River in present-day British Columbia and was kept secret until 800 ounces of gold was sent to San Francisco for assaying in February 1857.
A month later newspapers reported on the strike, sparking the Fraser River Gold Rush.
Within months, 30,000, mostly American, gold seekers flooded the banks of the Fraser River.
The population of Fort Victoria doubled almost overnight, much to the chagrin of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
For decades, the company had enjoyed near absolute power in the region, and it didn’t want its fur trading territory overrun by these new arrivals.
Many of the miners were from California, whose legendary gold rush was just drying up.
The massive influx of Americans led to the creation of the Colony of British Columbia as Britain wanted to prevent the lawlessness of the California gold fields.
There was also a concern that if Americans outnumbered British subjects, the United States would annex the territory.
To prevent that, the Colony of British Columbia was formed in 1858.
It should also be mentioned that while the gold rush led to the creation of British Columbia, it was extremely destructive to the Indigenous Nations of the Fraser River area. Their territory was overrun, hunting grounds depleted and diseases such as smallpox spread like wildfire.
In every story of a gold rush, there are those who strike gold and those who lose everything. More often than not in Canada, it was the First Nations who suffered the most when gold was discovered.
To hear more of this story in detail check out our sister podcast Deadman’s Curse.
While British colonial powers worried about American annexation, it turned out, those Americans were not staying long.
By the early-1860s, the Fraser River Gold Rush was drying up.
Almost on cue, a second gold rush was ready to begin.
In the Cariboo Mountains near the Rockies, prospectors who didn’t have luck in the Fraser River to the south, migrated up to the Horsefly River where a lucky few discovered a gold field in 1861.
News traveled quickly among prospectors, and as soon as someone uttered the words Cariboo and gold, hundreds of people began walking north.
But this was different. While the first wave of the Cariboo Gold Rush was made up of Americans, the bulk of the prospectors became British and Canadians on account of the American Civil War.
Many Americans returned home to take sides and fight in the conflict, many gave their lives.
Prospectors from eastern Canada and elsewhere in the British Empire had finally arrived in British Columbia for the Fraser River Gold Rush, only to be diverted to this new location instead.
And among those prospectors were about 150 people who ventured out from the east to find their fortune.
It was a legendary journey and not all of them survived.
Catherine O’Hare Schubert was 27-year-old when she made a decision with her husband that would change their lives.
She was born in 1835 in Ireland during the deathly grip of the Potato Famine.
After a typhus epidemic worsened conditions for her family, Catherine enrolled in a domestic science course offered by the British government which encouraged young Irish women to move to North America.
After completing the program, she left the only home she had ever known and travelled across the Atlantic to work as a domestic servant near Boston, where she learned to read in her spare time.
In 1855, she married Augustus Schubert, a carpenter from Germany and the couple moved to the Minnesota Territory, before going farther north to settle in St. Boniface, in modern-day Winnipeg.
Less than a year later, the Red River burst its banks, and took their home and everything they had with it.
Destitute, the family needed a new path forward.
Less than a year later, a group of men from Canada West, Canada East, the United States and the United Kingdom arrived at nearby Fort Garry via the railroad on a journey west to find gold.
They were the Overlanders and
Catherine, her husband and their three children linked up with them on their quest for gold.
At the helm of the Overlanders was an ambitious man seeking a fortune by the name of Thomas McMicking.
Born in 1829 in Stamford Township in Canada West, now Ontario, he was the oldest of 12 children to William and Mary McMicking.
He studied at the University of Toronto and upon graduation, he became a teacher in his hometown.
Hoping to move into politics, he ran in the 1861 election as a Clear Grit, a precursor to the Liberal Party, but lost to Conservative John Simpson.
With his political path going nowhere, and his salary not giving him high hopes for fame and riches, McMicking’s ears perked up when he heard of gold out west.
So, he organized a party of about 28 men to travel overland from Canada West to the Cariboo Region.
It was a journey of 3,200 kilometres as the crow flies.
In April 1862, he and the Overlanders left Queenston, Canada West for British Columbia.
With him was his brother Robert, along with Gilbert, William and Thomas Rennie, three brothers who also wanted to find gold for themselves.
As the group traveled west, they came across others who had the same destination in mind.
That original group of 28 men under McMicking, soon swelled to over 100.
The entire group was highly organized, and McMicking began charging a five-dollar fee to join and travel together.
The money was put towards buying supplies for everyone, and ensuring the group had what it needed to make the journey safely.
Before long, McMicking was chosen officially as leader through a vote, with a council of 13 men to serve as his advisors.
McMicking insisted they adopt rules to manage their journey including how they should behave in camp and on the trail.
Schedules, hours of travel and starting times were all put down on paper.
It was believed that being organized would make the trip easier.
They also determined what should be done in the case of a First Nations attack.
The Overlanders grew up reading sensationalized stories of Indigenous nations attacking settlers.
They had no way of knowing that such attacks were extremely rare, especially in Canada.
Later, McMicking said that the First Nations they met on their way were helpful, kind and in his words, “our best friends”.
The group reached Detroit by railway from St. Catharines on April 23 where they boarded another train to Grand Haven, Michigan then they boarded a steamer called Detroit, to Milwaukee.
This was followed by another train trip, followed by the steamer Frank Steele, until they reached St. Paul, Minnesota where Eustace Pattison and 18 other Englishmen joined the group.
Eustace and his group were hooked into the enterprise weeks earlier by an advertisement in English newspapers.
The British Columbia Overland Transit Company offered, for the small fee of 42 Pounds, to transport people from England to Canada via boat, then across to Winnipeg on a train.
From there the ad stated it was a simple matter of taking wagons all the way to British Columbia.
The company claimed the entire journey could be made in only five weeks.
As was common for those looking to make money off travelers looking to travel to remote gold rushes to portray the entire journey as a simple walk through the countryside.
The advertisement stated,
“This is the speediest, safest and most economical route to the gold diggings. The land transit is through a lovely country unequalled for its beauty and salubrity of climate.”
Eustace and the others soon discovered the harsh truth behind the blatant lie.
From St. Paul to Georgetown, the group’s journey slowed to a crawl because the trip 257 kilometres could only be made by a stagecoach.
The only problem was that the stagecoach could hold no more than 10 people at a time and the group had ballooned to about 150 men so the process of transporting them all took days.
Once reunited in Georgetown, the Overlanders discovered that their steamboat, the International, was still under construction.
They were stuck for days, waiting for it to finish.
In Georgetown McMicking met Alexander Grant Dallas, the Governor of Rupert’s Land, who was on his way to Fort Garry as well.
At the time, Rupert’s Land was still under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The territory covered three million square kilometres of land stretching from the Rocky Mountains to Nunavut and Labrador.
On May 26, the group finally reached Fort Garry. The entire trip from St. Catharines to Fort Garry had taken over a month, the same amount of time the British advertisement stated the journey to the Cariboo would take.
They weren’t even half way there. Getting to Fort Garry was easy compared to what happened next.
Fort Garry is where Catherine and Augustus re-enter our story.
Like so many others with gold fever, Augustus was enchanted by the stories of striking it rich out west, and having lost everything, he wanted to seek his fortune.
Catherine was not about to let him go alone and insisted the entire family join him.
One of the rules that McMicking and the Overlanders had adopted early on, was that no women were allowed.
I don’t know why this rule was in place, but it was likely because the men didn’t believe a woman could make such a long journey.
They had obviously never heard of Charlotte Small, wife of David Thompson.
Be sure to check out my episode on that amazing woman from 2023.
Like Charlotte Small, Catherine was determined, and she wasn’t going to be left behind, so the Overlanders made an exception.
She did leave out that she was pregnant with her fourth child, believing they would be at the Cariboo gold fields before the baby arrived.
As they left Fort Garry, never to return, Catherine rode a horse with her children Gus and Mary Jane in saddle baskets on either side. Augustus carried the youngest child, Jimmy, as he walked beside the horse.
They covered 1,600 kilometres to Fort Edmonton through heavy rain, deep mud and with mosquitoes tormenting them constantly.
Every morning, they woke up at 2:30 a.m., and left camp by 3 a.m. then traveled until breakfast at 5 a.m.
Then break for two hours, then more traveling until lunch from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Then travel until 5 p.m. when evening break began
As they journeyed, they created an immense line of over 150 people, 97 carts and 110 animals extending for one kilometre.
They rested on Sundays, reserving the day for singing hymns, praying and listening to scriptures.
Later in the trip, this would be abandoned as the desire to end their traveling torment overwhelmed any spirituality.
Along the way, the group was quick to discover that after Fort Garry, there were no bridge crossings over rivers.
This was by design, the Hudson’s Bay Company wanted to limit settlers on their fur trading lands. Travel without bridges was difficult, and few settlers went further than present-day Manitoba.
If you have ever played Oregon Trail, you know that the fording of a river can end in success just as easily as it can failure.
The Overlanders often risked fording rivers and when they could, they rented a ferry at various spots along the rivers.
These ferries could only take a few people and animals at a time, further delaying their endless march west.
Some of these small ferries had to cross100 times and over six hours to get the entire group to the other side
From Fort Garry to near the present-day Saskatchewan-Manitoba border, the Overlanders were aided by a guide.
But on June 18, they woke up to find their guide gone and the land covered in frost.
It was not a welcomed sight.
On June 25, they left the forests of Manitoba and entered the vast Prairies of what are now Saskatchewan and Alberta.
This is when the group’s discipline broke down.
Some hurried to the front to cross rivers first so they could continue ahead, which angered everyone behind them.
Tempers flared and quarrels were more common.
Nearly everyone had expected to be in Cariboo country by now, but they were still hundreds of kilometres away.
McMicking did his best to keep the group together, always pressing forward and using his charisma and leadership to keep everyone in line.
On June 30, they reached the South Saskatchewan River, the largest river they had faced so far, but on the other side was a Hudson’s Bay Company ferry.
A.C. Robertson, the best swimmer in the group, volunteered to jump in the water and cross the river to get the ferry.
He succeeded and for hours the group slowly transported everyone including their carts and animals.
Now in modern-day Alberta near Fort Pitt, the group separated into four that travelled close together.
McMicking was given the rank of Colonel of the entire group, while others, like A.C. Robertson, were named captains of the smaller ones
This helped to repair nerves as those who wanted to move faster could join a fast group, while slower travellers didn’t have to rush to keep up.
They also hired a guide to find their way to Fort Edmonton.
Unfortunately, almost as soon as this agreement was reached, the rains started.
For 11 days rain came down and soaked everything and everyone, and at one point on July 12, it rained so hard, no Overlander could journey that day.
McMicking did what he could to keep spirits up. They formed a musical society that had violinists, flautists and vocalists. Even during those rainy days, the orchestra did what it could to entertain everyone.
The rain also caused rivers to become raging beasts. Fording and ferries were out of the question.
From July 18 to 20, eight bridges were built. Some were only 12 metres long, while others were upwards of 30 metres.
When wood could be found, it was used for the bridges but at one point, the carts were put into the water to form a bridge across a small river to walk across.
Several carts were lost in the process.
On July 21, 1862, the party reached Fort Edmonton. This was the last place to top up supplies before British Columbia.
McMicking wrote,
“During the preceding eleven days, our clothing had never been dry, we had just passed through what we considered a pretty rough time, and the toil-worn, jaded, forlorn and tattered appearances of the company was in striking and amusing contrast with our appearance a few months before.”
For eight days, the party gathered what they needed.
The men in Fort Edmonton were happy to see the Overlanders, having been cut off from the rest of the world for months.
They also told the group that they had to leave their carts behind because only pack horses could be used to navigate through the mountains.
Overlander Archibald Thompson panned for gold outside Fort Edmonton and told the group that he had found some gold and convinced some to remain, rather than continue their journey.
I’ve lived near Edmonton most of my life. I can promise you, there is no gold in the river.
It is likely Archibald found fool’s gold.
Nonetheless, several men decided to stay at Fort Edmonton to pan for gold they would never find but at least they saved themselves weeks of torment on the trail to Cariboo country.
McMicking took pack animals, and the group began their long journey to the Rocky Mountains.
At one point west of Fort Edmonton, a man named Tim Love came across the group and shared with them that he found immense gold riches on the eastern slopes of the Rockies.
Nothing more than a conman, he convinced 25 men to follow him. None found a single ounce of gold.
The others continued towards the Yellowhead Pass.
They were aided by a Metis guide they had hired named Andre Cardinal, who guided them through the incredibly difficult as the forests were so thick that they had to chop a path to forge forward.
Despite it being August, the weather in the morning was cold and dew froze on leaves.
Sometimes the group had to swim across frigid rivers when a bridge could not be built, and with each passing kilometre more items were discarded to lighten the heavy loads.
For years afterwards, rusting bits of metal could be found along the path the Overlanders took.
To make matters worse, each person was getting weaker due to a depleting supply of food.
There was a brief respite in the misery on Aug. 13 when the Overlanders saw the Rocky Mountains for the first time.
McMicking wrote,
“A view at once sublimely grand and overpowering.”
There are three main passes into the Rocky Mountains.
In the far south, where the Frank Slide occurred is the Crowsnest Pass risings to 1,130 metres.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Frank Slide, make sure you listen to my episode from 2023 about that terrible disaster.
Farther north, near present-day Banff, there is the Kicking Horse Pass which rises to 1,627 metres and is where both the trans-continental railway and the Trans-Canada Highway were built.
Then there’s the Yellowhead Pass, it had the lowest elevation at 1,131 metres but that doesn’t mean it’s easier.
For one thing, the path was extremely narrow, and several horses fell to their deaths after they lost their footing.
One pack horse fell off the path and plummeted 121 metres.
Amazingly, the horse was unharmed and hauled back up to the path but two others that slid off at the same spot were not so lucky.
On Aug. 22, the Overlanders crossed over the continental divide and entered British Columbia.
They had expected the whole journey to take two months, they had been walking for three and were still not in Cariboo.
They were nearly out of food, so the Overlanders resorted to killing some of their oxen and horses.
Others shot anything they could find, including small birds and squirrels.
Pack animals that were not eaten were near the end of their ropes.
Some fell on the path dead from lack of food and exhaustion, while others crossed rivers only to be swept away.
One horse lost in the river took all the party’s cooking utensils with it.
But then, when things were at their most dire, Shuswap People appeared and brought them berries and fish, which the Overlanders gladly traded ammunition and clothing for.
Catherine and Augustus, with their three children strapped to their backs, had made the journey so far.
Alexander Fortune, one of the men in the party, stated that Catherine was a brave and devoted mother and her presence among the dozens of men created a kind atmosphere and disagreements were few and far between.
Catherine and her children also helped convince First Nations that the group was peaceful, not looking to start a war by entering their territory without permission.
Having filled their bellies, the Overlanders were at a crossroads…literally.
To head into the Cariboo Gold Fields, there were two options.
One was to go north to Fort George, present-day Prince George, and then down to Quesnel along the Fraser River.
The other option was to journey down the North Thompson River south towards Fort Kamloops.
A meeting was held on Sept. 1, 1862, and decided everyone could go their own way.
McMicking led the group heading towards Fort George and Quesnel on the Fraser River.
To make the journey, they built rafts to navigate the turbulent river
On a raft with 32 men, which McMicking named for his hometown of Queenston, he ventured down the Fraser River.
There were several other rafts with him, all hoping they would survive the journey.
Eustace Pattison took a canoe and reached the Grand Canyon of the Fraser River a full two days ahead of everyone else.
There was no way that the canoe could handle the rapids ahead, so Pattison and two others attached a rope to the front of the canoe and tried to align it up with the riverbank.
It didn’t take long for the rope to snap, and the canoe disappeared into the rapids with all their supplies.
The three men sat waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, shivering in the cold, with no food and nothing to keep them warm.
Two days later, A.C. Robertson, the strong swimmer with the Overlanders and a right-hand man of McMicking, arrived with his own canoe connected to another by a rope.
As they hit the rapids, the water tore them apart.
Robertson and two men with him were thrown into the water.
He called out to them to hold onto a canoe stuck on rocks while he swam to shore to get help.
As soon as he attempted to swim away from the canoes, the river took him.
His body was never found.
Thankfully McMicking appeared on his large raft and rescued the men in the water.
Soon after, they reached Pattison and the two men with him, who were still waiting on shore.
To minimize the risk to everyone in the rapids, it was decided 10 men would stay on his raft, while the others walked on shore.
McMicking wrote,
“Onward they sped like an arrow. They seemed to be rushing into the very jaws of death.”
McMicking’s raft, and the rafts of the others who followed him, made it through the rapids, and the rough waters ahead.
On Sept. 8, McMicking and his group reached Fort George.
By this point, the young Eustace Pattison was suffering from diphtheria.
The two days he spent waiting with no supplies or dry clothing, had severely weakened him.
That night, he died and was buried outside Fort George, never having reached the gold fields.
On Sept. 11, 1862, McMicking and his group reached Quesnelle Mouth, located at present-day Quenel, British Columbia.
McMicking attempted to reach Williams Creek to begin mining but it was too late in the season, and he was hearing discouraging reports from other miners who were turning back towards the Pacific Coast.
The journey for this part of the Overlanders was over.
It appeared that the entire trip had been for nothing.
Augustus and Catherine chose the southern route towards Fort Kamloops on the North Thompson River and for them there were still many kilometres to go.
In their group, there were 32 people and 100 horses and cattle.
The journey south was extremely difficult, despite it being a shorter distance.
At one point, all their provisions and baggage were lost in the Murchison Rapids on the North Thompson River.
At the narrow part of the river named Hell’s Pass, not to be confused with the even more treacherous Hell’s Pass farther south on the Fraser River, most of the remaining rafts were destroyed.
From this point on, the group had to walk. Most of their food was gone, and to fill their stomachs, they ate edible plants whenever they could.
They came upon a deserted Indigenous village. Corpses were littered throughout, all victims of the deadly smallpox epidemics that swept during the gold rushes.
The group continued until they reached Fort Kamloops, near the end of their ropes, on Oct. 13.
One day later, with the help of an Indigenous woman, Catherine Schubert gave birth to her fourth child. Named Rose, she is believed to be the first white girl born in the interior of British Columbia.
A Mr. DeWitt, who was with the group, stated,
“The poor woman was here confined and presented her husband with a fine little girl, much to the surprise of many of the party.”
McMicking later heaped praise on Catherine in his journal, stating,
“In performing this journey, Mrs. Schubert has accomplished a task to which, but few women are equal, and with the additional care of three small children, one which but few men would have the courage to undertake.”
By the time the Overlanders arrived at their destinations in the fall of 1862, the best gold deposits were taken, and others were nearly exhausted.
Most of the Overlanders left the country in the spring of 1863, having never mined for gold.
Thomas McMicking may have never found fortune, but he did find a new home.
He briefly worked in a shingle mill. He then wrote a narrative of his journey that was published in the British Columbian, the newspaper in town, in a series of articles from Nov. 29, 1862, to Jan. 23, 1863.
In 1864, he was appointed the town clerk for New Westminster, and became the deputy sheriff two years later. On June 26, 1866, he organized a home guard due to the Fenian Raids occurring in eastern Canada.
The Fenian Brotherhood were part of a movement to secure Ireland’s independence from Britain.
From the United States, the Fenians attacked Canada in the early-1860s in the hopes of diverting resources from Britain to Canada and aid the Irish cause across the Atlantic.
The raids never went farther west than the Great Lakes, but nonetheless McMicking became a First Lieutenant in the home guard.
Sadly, his story was cut far too short.
On Aug. 25, 1866, he was visiting a friend in New Westminster when his six-year-old son William fell into the Fraser River. McMicking dove in to rescue his son but was swept away in the water. Both lost their lives.
But what happened to the Schuberts?
Augustus and Catherine Schubert remained in British Columbia where two other children Charles and Nora were born.
Catherine ran an inn and restaurant, while Augustus panned for gold.
He didn’t have much success, but Catherine became a staple of the local community of Lillooet. She taught local children to read and assisted in midwifery in the region.
Eventually in 1881, the family built a school on their property and hired a teacher.
And that is where they remained for decades, until tragedy struck.
While working in 1908, Augustus fell off a ladder and died.
Catherine sold the farm and moved to Armstrong, British Columbia where she remained until her own death in 1918.
Today, a memorial honours the Schubert family in Armstrong, which states that they were brave and notable pioneers.
There is a statue in Kamloops of Augustus and Catherine with their children, and Schubert Drive in the city is named for them.
